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A Poison Tree / Blake
"A Poison Tree" is a poem written by William Blake, published in 1794 as part of the Songs of Experience collection in his book, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. A Poison Tree I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine,-- And into my garden stole When the night had veiled the pole; In the morning, glad, I see My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Background The Songs of Experience was published in 1794 as a follow up to Blake's 1789 Songs of Innocence.''Gilchrist 1907 p. 118 The two books were published together under the merged title ''Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul: the author and printer, W. Blake featuring 54 plates. The illustrations are arranged differently in some copies, while a number of poems were moved from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience. Blake continued to print the work throughout his life.Davis 1977 p. 55 Of the copies of the original collection, only 28 published during his life are known to exist, with an additional 16 published posthumously.Damon 1988 p. 378 Only 5 of the poems from Songs of Experience appeared individually before 1839,Bentley 2003 p. 148 with "A Poison Tree" originally published in the 1830 London University Magazine.Bentley 2003 p. 473 The original title of the poem is "Christian Forbearance",Davis 1977 p. 56 and was placed as number 10 in the Rossetti manuscript,Raine 2002 p. 32 printed on a plate illustrated by a corpse under a barren tree. The body was shown in a similar manner to the crucified corpse of Blake's "A Negro on the Rack" in John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative.Davis 1973 p. 56 Analysis Themes "A Poison Tree" describes the narrator's repressed feelings of anger towards an individual, emotions which eventually lead to murder. The poem explores themes of indignation, revenge, and more generally the fallen state of mankind. Andrew Stauffer, in 2009, called the poem "Blake's best-known depiction of personal anger's destructive effects". The poem suggests that acting on anger reduces the need for vengeance, which may be connected to the British view of anger held following the start of the French Revolution. The revolutionary forces were commonly connected to the anger with opposing sides calling the anger either a motivating rationale or something that blinded an individual to reason.Stauffer 2009, 87-88. Blake, like Coleridge, believed that anger needed to be expressed, but both were wary of the type of emotion that, rather than guide, was able to seize control.Stauffer 2009 pp. 58 Poisoning appears in many of Blake's poems. The poisoner of "A Poison Tree" is similar to Blake's Jehovah, Urizen, Satan, and Newton. Through poisoning an individual, the victim ingests part of the poisoner, as food, through reading, or other actions, as an inversion on the Eucharist. Through ingestion, the poisoned sense of reason of the poisoner is forced onto the poisoned. Thus, the death of the poisoned can be interpreted as a replacement of the poisoned's individuality.Peterfreund 1998 pp. 36-37 The world of the poem is one where dominance is key, and there is no reciprocal interaction between individuals because of a lack of trust.Glen 1983 pp. 202, 347 The poem, like others in Songs of Experience, reflects a uniquely Christian sense of alienation.Peterfreund 1998 p. 179 As such, "A Poison Tree" appears to play off the Christian idea of self-denial, and it is possible that Blake is relying on Emanuel Swedenborg's theme of piety concealing malice, which ultimately alienates the individual from their true identity and evil no longer appears to be evil. Blake's poem differs from Swedenborg's theory by containing an uncontrollable progression through actions that lead to the conclusion. The final murder is beyond the control of the narrator, and the poem reflects this by switching from past to the present tense. The poem's theme of duplicity and the inevitable conclusion is similar to the anonymous poem "There was a man of double deed."Glen 1983 pp. 188-190 The image of the tree appears in many of Blake's poems, and seems connected to his concept of the Fall of Man. It is possible to read the narrator as a divine figure who uses the tree to seduce mankind into disgrace. This use of the fallen state can also be found in the poems "The Human Abstract" and "London" from the Songs of Experience series.Thompson 1994 p. 218 The actual tree, described as a tree of "Mystery", appears again in "The Human Abstract" ,and both trees are grown within the mind. Form The poem consists of 4 stanzas written in catalectic trochaic tetrameter - each line having 4 trochaic feet, but with the last syllable of the last foot missing, so that the line both begins and ends with a stressed syllable. The poem begins with an emphasis on the 1st person, with every line of stanza 1 (S1) beginning with "I". In S2 and S3, the emphasis shifts to telling a narrative, with 3 of the 4 lines beginning with "And". The original draft has a line drawn beneath S1, which could denote that Blake originally intended the poem as concluding at L4.Glen 1983 p. 190 There are also many differences between the manuscript and published versions of the poem, with the original LL 3-4 reading "At a Friends Errors Anger Shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe."Staufer 2009 p. 77 Critical reception Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after being lent a copy of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience by Charles Tulk, annotated the lines of his copy with symbols representing the phrases "it gave me great pleasure" "and yet" "in the lowest".Bentley 2003 pp. 351-252 An anonymous review in the March 1830 London University Magazine titled "The Inventions of William Blake, Painter and Poet", stated before discussing the poem: "let us continue to look over his notes, bright both with poetry and forms divine, which demonstrate an intimate knowledge of the passions and feelings of the human breast".Bentley 1975 p. 201 After quoting the poem in full, the writer claimed, "If Blake had lived in Germany, by this time he would have had commentators of the highest order upon every one of his effusions; but here, so little attention is paid to works of the mind". Recognition Ralph Vaughan Williams set the poem to music in his 1958 song cycle Ten Blake Songs. The poem was also set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. See also *Other poems by Blake References *Bentley, G.E. (editor) William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1975. *Bentley, G.E. Jr. The Stranger From Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. *Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. *Davis, Michael. William Blake: A New Kind of Man. University of California Press, 1977. *Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. London: John Lane Company, 1907. *Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. *Peterfreund, Stuart. William Blake in a Newtonian World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. *Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2002. *Stauffer, Andrew. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. *Thompson, Edward. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Notes External links ;Audio / video *"A Poison Tree" at YouTube *Musical arrangements of "A Poison Tree" at YouTube ;About *"A Short Analysis of William Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’ at Interesting Literarute Category:Songs of Innocence and of Experience Category:1794 poems Category:English poems Category:18th-century poems Category:Poetry by William Blake